OpenAlex: Find Real Research to Back Up Your Business Decisions
OpenAlex is a free, open catalog of the world's research: journal articles, books, theses and the people and schools behind them. It tells you what exists, who wrote it, who cites it, and whether there is a free copy you can read. As of October 2026 its catalog counts more than 326 million works (326,886,422 when we checked the live total on October 13).
Three ways to use it this week
- A bakery testing a new loaf can look up studies on sourdough and shelf life before changing a recipe.
- Anyone writing a blog post or a sales page can find a real study to quote instead of repeating a number nobody can trace. A claim with a source behind it is easier for customers, and AI search tools, to trust.
- A landscaper, pest-control company or clinic can search its own trade's topics, such as "drought tolerant turfgrass," and filter to papers with a free full-text copy.
Try it now (no key, no account)
Open this link in your browser: api.openalex.org/works?search=sourdough shelf life&filter=is_oa:true&per_page=3
It returns the top three open-access papers about sourdough and bread shelf life, each with a link to a free copy. When we tried it on October 13, 2026, it found 6,022 matching works. The results come back as raw data (JSON); for a normal search page, use openalex.org.
Limits and rules
OpenAlex now gives every user a small daily budget, counted in dollars but free up to the limit:
- No key: $0.10 of use per day. A search costs $0.001, so that is about 100 searches a day. Looking up one item by its ID is free.
- Free key: make a free account and you get $1 per day, ten times the keyless budget.
- Speed: up to 10 requests per second without a key, 30 with a free key.
- Go over and you get a "429" error until the budget resets at midnight UTC. Paid plans exist for heavy users.
License and credit
OpenAlex says its data "is a public good, released under a CC0 public-domain license," so you can reuse the catalog information freely. The papers themselves are different: each keeps its own copyright, so read the license on the paper before you copy from it. OpenAlex asks (it does not require) that you cite: Priem, J., Piwowar, H., & Orr, R. (2022). OpenAlex: A fully-open index of scholarly works, authors, venues, institutions, and concepts. ArXiv. https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.01833
Golden Rock can wire OpenAlex into a client's website or app, such as a research lookup page for their trade.
Who should care: owners who want facts with a source behind them.